CodeEval has named its top coding languages for 2014, and we see a couple of interesting surprises. Year-over-year, C# was the second-fastest growing language. And Internet powerhouse PHP was the biggest loser, down 55 percent from 2012.

We took a look at the trends from 2011 through 2013, and here’s what we found:

By volume, Python and Java reigned supreme. But Java, as you can see, is something of an ailing giant despite the popularity of Android with consumers.

When you look at percentage change from 2011 to the present, iOS coding language Objective-C is still going strong. But check out C#! This Microsoft technology is still small in sheer volume, but it’s growing quickly:

Some of us were less surprised than others. Take Gregg Pollack from Code School.

“C# is the language of the Microsoft developer. There have been lots of improvements to the language over the past 10 years, so this isn’t that surprising,” he told VentureBeat via email.

He also had some thoughts on Java’s decline:

Interpreted languages like Python and Ruby have better language design and thus are more pleasant to program with. This fuels the open source community around the languages, which encourages cutting edge developers (and thus, startups) to adopt them. The bigger corporations slowly follow.

In my experience many Java developers have moved to these interpreted languages.

CodeEval gathered this data “based on thousands of data points we’ve collected by processing over 100,000+ coding tests and challenges by over 2,000+ employers,” according to the company blog.

The company enables devs to show off, particularly to potential clients and/or employers, by completing coding challenges created (or merely chosen from a library) by employers. Devs are rewarded with cash and prized for their efforts.

]]>0The most popular coding languages for 2014 are …Teachers start 25 state petitions to add computer science to grad requirementshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/12/09/teachers-start-25-state-petitions-to-add-computer-science-to-grad-requirements/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/09/teachers-start-25-state-petitions-to-add-computer-science-to-grad-requirements/#commentsTue, 10 Dec 2013 00:25:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=870211Only 14 states in the U.S. currently permit tough computer science courses to count toward graduation requirements for math and science. Meanwhile, some surveys say that 570,000 jobs are going unfilled in computing — and that the demand for software engineers is four times higher than the national average. Teachers are working to change that. […]
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Only 14 states in the U.S. currently permit tough computer science courses to count toward graduation requirements for math and science. Meanwhile, some surveys say that 570,000 jobs are going unfilled in computing — and that the demand for software engineers is four times higher than the national average.

Teachers are working to change that.

According to Change.org, there are currently more than 25 petitions around the country to ask state and education officials to “make computer science count” for graduation — and for college admission. One, in California, currently has 5,364 supporters and needs 636 more to reach its goal.

“A key obstacle is that rigorous, college-preparatory computer science courses do not satisfy a core mathematics or science admission requirement for either the University of California [UC] or California State University [CSU] system,” petition creator Debra Richardson writes. And she adds: “By 2018, California will need to fill 517,890 computing-related jobs – about half of a total of 1.1 million STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] jobs.”

Other states with active petitions include Texas, New York, Maine, Florida, New Jersey, Kansas, Massachusetts, Utah, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.

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“Less than 2.4 percent of college students graduate with a degree in computer science,” says Amy Hirotaka, who works with the nonprofit computer science education association Code.org. “Everyone should have access to quality computer science education … with more states allowing CS credits to count toward graduation we’ll see programs expand and more students take part in this essential field.”

This New York petition says that the empire state will need to fill 423,000 STEM jobs by 2018 and that more than half of them will be in computing. Only 2,640 supporters have digitally signed that petition so far.

Most of the number of STEM and computer science jobs that the petitions are citing seem to come from the Conference Board, a business-insights organization. There’s been some concern by some over the past years that numbers like these have been used to justify raising immigration visas for developers and keeping wages low — and some dispute on how real the numbers are.

Whatever the case is there, however, there’s no doubt that computer science jobs are increasing, that we need more qualified people to fill them, and that we’re not adequately training all the young graduates we need.

Contributing to free/open-source software is one of the best ways to learn how to be a better hacker, both technically and ethically.

Most devs end up using a huge amount of open-source code in their projects, so giving back to these projects only makes sense.

That’s the main idea behind the Google Code-in, a contest for teens to jump-start their participation in open-source software.

From the contest site:

Google Code-in is intended to help students who may have wanted to get involved in open source but didn’t know where to start. By working through the tasks created by participating open source organizations, contestants will be given the opportunity to engage with the open source community and get involved. The participating open source organizations gain the benefit of additional contributions to their project, often in important areas that may get overlooked for whatever reason. It is Google’s not so secret hope that the student contestants of today will be long-term contributors to these and other open source projects in the future.

The contest starts today and runs through January 6, 2014. Google and its partners provide small, concrete tasks; teens choose tasks that interest them and earn points for each task completed.

At the end of the contests, Google’s partners (a group of 10 open-source software organizations) will name grand prize winners — two winners per company, so a total of 20 winners.

The prize is like a nerd’s Golden Ticket trip to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory: Each student and one parent or guardian gets a trip to Google’s Mountain View HQ to hang out with Google engineers, tour the campus, and participate in an awards ceremony. Get out of bed, Grandpa Joe!

Tasks will involve work in a few areas: Code, documentation, QA, UIs, and research/marketing/community management.

Pre-college teens 13 to 17 years old can register now; participation is free of charge.

The fundamental relationship between security and development is broken.

It’s broken because security teams drive security, and development teams let them. There needs to be a re-balancing of this relationship, driven by an awakening in the developer community.

Development teams abdicate security because they don’t understand it. They abdicate because they are too busy building features. They abdicate because they are too busy fighting fires. Developers are just too damn busy.

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Editor’s note: Developers! If you’re good and want to be great, our upcoming DevBeat conference, Nov. 12-13 in San Francisco, is a hands-on event packed with master classes, presentations, Q&As, and hackathons, all aimed at boosting your code skills, security knowledge, hardware hacking, and career development. We’ll also have special sessions dedicated to security. Register now.

And yet, there was a time when developers were too busy for quality. But a new culture has begun to sweep over the developer community. Admired developers and bloggers are flying the banner of test-driven development. It is motivated by the desire to move faster, deploy more frequently and get feedback incrementally. And with this cultural change, we’ve seen a flood of practical tools and techniques to make test development more efficient and automated. The idea of throwing untested code over to the Quality Assurance (QA) team once every 12 months is starting to look antiquated and unprofessional.

What happened? Developers woke up and realized that they need to own quality. And the job of QA became more about assurance and less about trying to test quality in at the end. QA is becoming about validating that quality was built-in from the beginning. This should give us hope that security could follow the same path.

Let’s acknowledge that perfectly secure software is impossible. It’s even more impossible at scale, using frameworks and operating systems and services that are themselves riddled with weaknesses. In the limit, security is an infinite cost center. It’s never completely done.

Therefore, practical security must be about efficiency. It must be about finding ways to maximize cost-effectiveness. And the only way for anything to be cost-effective in development is for it to be considered as early as possible. An architectural problem is cheapest to detect when the architecture is being designed. A coding error is cheapest to detect when the code is first written.

We can start by taking security seriously as developers. This means facing the fact that security teams don’t have the scale or resources to find all the weaknesses for us. And it means realizing we don’t have the needed security expertise to make some key decisions about how we design, code, test, deploy, and maintain our applications. We have an obligation to pull in security expertise when it can have the most impact. We have an obligation to incorporate security into our planning, our processes, and our culture. That’s what developer-first security is ultimately about.

Andy Chou spent four years hacking through an undergraduate degree in EECS at UC Berkeley and got sick of debugging his own code. He spent the next four years at Stanford researching ways to automatically detect bugs in code by leveraging compilers. After completing his PhD in 2003, Andy cofounded Coverity to commercialize this work. Now, he enjoys running the Coverity Security Research Laboratory.

]]>2Developers need to start thinking about security nowCodecademy for the cloud: Google’s new Cloud Playground is pure geniushttp://venturebeat.com/2013/06/24/codecademy-for-the-cloud-googles-new-cloud-playground-is-absolute-genius/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/24/codecademy-for-the-cloud-googles-new-cloud-playground-is-absolute-genius/#commentsMon, 24 Jun 2013 23:26:01 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=763834In literally two clicks, you can start a development project in the cloud, see its code, and start playing with an app on Google's App Engine, Compute Engine, or Datastore. That's exactly what I just did.
]]>The biggest challenges with adopting a new platform are unfamiliarity, uncertainty, and switching costs. Which is exactly why Google’s new Cloud Playground is a perfect way to get serious about tempting developers to switch from Amazon or Microsoft’s clouds.

Or to start developing in the cloud for the first time.

In literally two clicks, you can start a development project in the cloud, see its code, and start playing with an app on Google’s App Engine, Compute Engine, or Datastore. That’s exactly what I just did:

Above: A quick “hello world” guestbook app in Google Cloud Playground

Image Credit: John Koetsier

Sometimes you just want to dip your toes in, Google says, or try out some sample code. It’s impractical to go first through all the steps of installing the App Engine SDK, setting up an account, adding payment credentials if needed, and setting up an entire development environment. And by the time you’re finished, you’ve lost your motivation to try the code you just wanted to test.

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You can start with sample projects that Google has already created, or you can clone open source App Engine projects in Python from Github. Either way, you’ll looking at sample code and projects in seconds. Play with the variables, add a few lines of code, change some strings, and then the magic happens.

Simply click the green arrow button to watch your code execute on Google’s cloud platform, and see the results live in real-time in your browser window. Essentially, it’s like Codecademy for the cloud, Google App Engine for idiots, or cloud-enabled applications development for newbies.

Above: Plenty of projects to copy and test

Image Credit: John Koetsier

There are two major opportunities for Google here.

First, Google will find it much easier to get developers to consider its cloud services even when they’re already using Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or other cloud providers’ environments. It’s super-easy to give Google’s cloud a quick test-drive. That alone won’t drive migration decisions, but the toe in the door is a time-honored sales tactic for a reason: it works.

Second, Google is appealing to a massive cohort of developers and companies who are not yet using the cloud to build and deploy applications. With Cloud Playground, they now have no reason not to take a few minutes, an hour, or a day to play, and learn, and get a sense of what their apps would do in the cloud.

“We’ve been working toward this redesign for almost a year now, and we think it’s a massive step forward in using GitHub,” says lead designer Kyle Neath in a blog post.

“GitHub is a product you use every day,” he continued. “We’ve focused on this and optimized for how people interact with GitHub on a daily basis. The next time you click through on a notification email, you’ll find a dramatic reduction of persistent section navigation cluttering up the page.”

The team also simplified the interface to bring more focus to the code itself, including pull requests and issues. Other optimizations were all about decreasing load times thanks to some pjax magic.

“It’s a big change and may take a few days to feel right,” Neath said. “As always, this is just the beginning. This redesign paves the way for an even faster, more focused GitHub. And we can’t wait to see what the future holds.”

The rollout starts today and will be complete within the next couple weeks.

GitHub, famously bootstrapped for most of its half-decade lifespan, took a record-breaking $100 million Series A about a year ago. The cash, which came from Andreessen Horowitz, was specifically intended to fund products and projects like this — things that add polish to an already popular application, making it more appealing to the enterprise customers who supply the company’s income.

As that old adage goes, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Rather than change the system from the outside, entrepreneurs are slowly making their way to the White House to expedite the glacial pace of change.

D.C.’s latest get is Code for America‘s founder and executive director Jennifer Pahlka, who will serve as US CTO Todd Park’s deputy CTO. Pahlka describes Code for America (CfA) as a “Peace Corps for geeks;” it’s a fellowship program that places talented programmers and web designers in cash-strapped cities to build apps that will benefit locals.

Park is also an entrepreneur; prior to taking the job at the CTO for the United States, he founded the electronic health records company Athenahealth.

In his current role as CTO, Park has already kickstarted the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which pairs innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with government officials to collaborate during focused 6-13 month “tours of duty.” Pahlka will run the Presidential Innovation Fellows program.

She may also lend a hand with Park’s plans to replicate the Health Datapalooza conference in other sectors. Health Datapalooza, now in its third year, is a conference that helps developers build health applications using government data.

Pahlka announced the news in a blog post — it’s definitely worth a read. She wrote:

Todd [Park] has proven without a doubt that the federal government can operate on lean startup principles and timeframes, that data creates value, and that there is a network of amazing people already changing the culture of government.

Pahlka will be working with Park as a fellow, and stresses that she will resume her role at Code for America next year.

]]>0Code for America’s Jen Pahlka goes to Washington450M lines of code say large open source and small closed source software projects are worst qualityhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/05/09/450-million-lines-of-code-say-large-open-source-and-small-closed-source-software-projects-are-worst-quality/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/09/450-million-lines-of-code-say-large-open-source-and-small-closed-source-software-projects-are-worst-quality/#commentsThu, 09 May 2013 16:34:00 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=734559The good news is that software keeps getting better, with fewer than one error per thousand lines of code. The bad news is that both large open-source projects and small proprietary software projects tend to have worse quality than average.
]]>The good news is that software keeps getting better, with fewer than one error per thousand lines of code. The bad news is that both large open-source projects and small proprietary software projects tend to have worse quality than average.

Development testing service Coverity’s annual scan report, which is based on data from almost 500 software projects with a total of over 450 million lines of code, says that almost 230,000 defects were found and fixed. And while the average defect density per thousand lines of code was almost identical between open source and proprietary, there was an interesting diversion in the results.

Open source projects, Coverity says, tend to have .69 bugs per thousand lines of code, virtually the same as proprietary software, which tends to have .68 errors per thousand lines. But large closed-source projects — over one million lines of code — tend to have 33 percent fewer errors than small closed-source projects, with .66 errors over each thousand lines of larger projects compared to .98 in smaller projects. And small open source projects have a massive 70 percent fewer errors than large open source software, with only .44 defects compared to .75.

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The difference, according to Coverity, is that small open source projects are labors of love by individual developers or small teams, who carefully comb through their code to reduce errors. Large open source projects, on the other hand, tend to lack standardized processes to ensure code quality, and so the error rate increases.

In commercial or closed-source software, developers experience almost the opposite conditions. Large projects tend to have well-defined formal testing processes, which ensure higher code quality, and small projects tend to be hasty, quick endeavors that show the effects of growing pains, as no standardized testing is in place.

In other words, if you’re looking for bug-free apps, look for a small open source project or a large proprietary piece of software, because those have the best chance of having few defects and high overall code quality.

]]>0450M lines of code say large open source and small closed source software projects are worst qualityCodenvy raises $9M to take code for a ride in the cloudhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/02/26/codenvy-raises-9m-to-take-code-for-a-ride-in-the-cloud/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/26/codenvy-raises-9m-to-take-code-for-a-ride-in-the-cloud/#commentsTue, 26 Feb 2013 20:13:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=628248Cloudenvy provides an environment for developers to code, build, and test apps in the cloud.
]]>Investors are green with Codenvy. Today, the startup which provides a cloud-based environment to code, build, and test apps, announced that it closed $9 million in its first round of funding.

Cloud computing has fundamentally changed the world of IT. Business operations from tracking sales leads to finance management are increasingly going airborne due to the cloud’s flexibility, 24-hour access, and lower cost. However, many developers still work on their desktops, which can limit their productivity.

“The Integrated Development Environemnt (IDE) model for application development hasn’t changed in four decades,” said CEO Tyler Jewell in a statement. “It’s so pervasive, the IT industry has become complacent to its severe limitations.”

Codenvy’s solution requires no downloading to access the full stack browser environment, with multiple language and framework options. The company claims developers can gain up to two additional hours of coding time each day through features like “always-on workspaces, parallel multicore compilation, continuous iterative deponent, and multicursor pair programming.” Teams can also share their workspaces to facilitate collaboration.

Programming teams can use Codenvy to run and test their applications, go through the complete “build lifecycle” (validate, compile, test, package, and deploy), and edit code in the browser. Integration partners include GitHub, ReHat Openshift, Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, VMWare, Heroku, and AppFog. The company has 50,000 registered developers. The service is free for public projects and otherwise involves a monthly subscription free ranging from a $9 a month “secure” option for five private projects to Codenvy Enterprise, which carries a variable, case-by-case pricing basis.

Toba Capital led this $9 million round, with participation from Auriga Partners and a number of angel investors. Codenvy was formerly known as Exo IDE and is based in San Francisco.

]]>0Codenvy raises $9M to take code for a ride in the cloudThinkful’s custom code tutoring may help you land a jobhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/02/26/thinkfuls-custom-code-tutoring-may-help-you-land-a-job/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/26/thinkfuls-custom-code-tutoring-may-help-you-land-a-job/#commentsTue, 26 Feb 2013 17:41:13 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=628511Thinkful's virtual tutoring platform provides personalized training for college students in practical skills like web development and design.
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Gone are the days when smart and enterprising young college graduates could head to The Big City and easily find a desirable job.

Thinkful’s education platform provides students and recent graduates with one-on-one training in high-demand, practical skills. Today, the company announced that it received $1 million in seed financing from Peter Thiel, RRE Ventures, Quotidian Ventures and others.

“The demand for professional education is surging as jobs become more specialized,” said Stuart Ellman of RRE Ventures in a statement. “Over 56% of recent college grads are unemployed or underemployed, yet 300,000 positions in highly skilled job sectors remain unfilled. No longer must education be seen as a distinct period in a young person’s life. We must constantly be retraining ourselves.”

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Programming and design skills are extremely valuable in today’s job market, even outside of Silicon Valley. Thinkful adopts the “apprenticeship” teaching model, whereby students work with qualified mentors and gain practical experience through projects. Featured courses include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, and wireframing, among others. Tutors personalize the curriculum based on each student’s backgrounds, needs, and goals.

The front-end course lasts about three months and costs $750. In addition to mentorship and experiential projects, students also have access to Thinkful’s Employer Network, which involves about 50 tech companies interesting in hiring its graduates.

Many people have turned to Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCS) like Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, and Lynda.com to bolster their professional skill set, appreciating them as cost-effective, accessible, and convenient alternatives to real-world institutions. However, the openness of the channel means the quality of the education is not always on the same level.

“The simple fact of education is that we learn best from experts,” said CEO and cofounder Darrell Silver in a statement. “Nine out of ten students enrolling in massively open online courses aren’t completing them. We believe personal interaction and collaboration with students is required, and we’re building Thinkful to make this possible for everyone.”

Silver’s cofounder Dan Friedman was selected as one of the first 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows in 2011, and Thinkful marks the first investment Thiel has made in a Thiel Fellows company. Thinkful is based in New York City. Over the past four months, twenty-five students participated in the pilot program and Thinkful worked together with employers to develop the curricula. This financing will contribute to adding coaches and expanding the number of students.

]]>0Thinkful’s custom code tutoring may help you land a job‘Nerds that code’ battle on toward global dominationhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/10/24/nerds-that-code-battle-on-towards-global-domination/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/24/nerds-that-code-battle-on-towards-global-domination/#commentsWed, 24 Oct 2012 21:36:08 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=563156This info graphic shows a breakdown of the worldwide developer population and their path toward global domination.
]]>Nerds are taking over the world! Or at least its economy. But who are these software engineers creating the platforms, tools, and services fundamentally changing the way business is done? According to the info graphic below, they are an army 17 million strong. And their numbers are growing. They may not be cool, but they are the force pushing the global economy forward.

The software industry is booming, with billions of dollars circulating in annual investment, acquisitions, deals, and IPOs, not to mention sky-high valuations. Businesses across all industries and around the world are run on software, and as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it “software is eating the world.” So who are the people behind this seismic shift? These new titans of industry? Why, the nerds, of course! Specifically, nerds that code.

“This isn’t the first time software and technology has been at the forefront of the economy,” said Patrick Moran, a VP at New Relic. “But it’s the first time developers are front and center. Not CIOs. Not IT solution sellers. Developers. Redmonk has been talking about how developers are the new kingmakers and wielding unprecedented power thanks to the cloud, open source, and other macro trends.”

Moran wrote a blog post titled “Is this the ‘Nerd Economy’?” In true nerd form, the audience demanded data to back this up, and so New Relic created this info graphic. Check it out, and then buy your ticket to Devlandia, a land where Red Bull flows like water and everybody wears cotton T-shirts.

]]>0‘Nerds that code’ battle on toward global dominationWanna learn to code? Here’s your chancehttp://venturebeat.com/2012/09/10/wanna-learn-to-code-heres-your-chance/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/10/wanna-learn-to-code-heres-your-chance/#commentsMon, 10 Sep 2012 13:38:28 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=526960Our six different courses combine for hundreds of lectures and over 70 hours of curriculum on writing code for websites, iOS games and applications, Ruby on Rails, PS6, and more.
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Learning to code is overwhelming. As with any daunting task, it can be difficult to know where to start. Learning code is like dieting: Under all the gimmicks and claims is a core formula to success that requires hard work and determination. Once you get this simple principle, you can achieve sustainable, real progress in your goals. Code is similar to dieting in that you really can’t take any shortcuts.

That’s why we’ve put together comprehensive coding bootcamp bundle. Don’t let the title deter you. The “bootcamp” is as strenuous as the student desires. Keep in mind the bundle covers coding instruction for websites, iOS games, iOS apps, Ruby on Rails, PS6, and more, so your options are plentiful and completely up to you. Six different courses combine for hundreds of lectures and over 70 hours of curriculum. Don’t fret, though; each lecture is brief, with essential aspects to the courses respective coding language allowing you to move at your own speed, honing in specific skills. I know online education has its skeptics. I love traditional classrooms, too, but learning at your pace and convenience makes online courses extraordinary educational tools.

Each of the professors have impressive credentials, experiencing immense levels of success in their area of programming expertise. Computers have only been prevalent for two decades, making standards for teaching code nearly invisible in comparison to the liberal arts. Your coding professors were and are at the forefront of this new age art. Not only are these some of the first to learn code, but they’re also among the first to discover its nuances, making them ideal candidates to get you up and running. Don’t hesitate to learn more about them under the “read more” button on the Learn To Code Bootcamp sale page.

This is a serious bargain for anyone interested in learning to code. If one coding language is not working for you, feel free try another without the financial repercussions. For less than the price of one community college course, you can’t go wrong!

]]>0Wanna learn to code? Here’s your chanceWhy one company is making all its employees learn how to codehttp://venturebeat.com/2012/04/27/everyone-must-code/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/27/everyone-must-code/#commentsFri, 27 Apr 2012 16:07:15 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=421839GUEST: The most successful companies are ones that are never satisfied with the status quo. They are too busy looking for ways to improve their products, personnel, and experience for their customers. There are many approaches a company can take to improve itself. For us, it meant trying something revolutionary that would arm our employees with […]
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The most successful companies are ones that are never satisfied with the status quo. They are too busy looking for ways to improve their products, personnel, and experience for their customers.

There are many approaches a company can take to improve itself. For us, it meant trying something revolutionary that would arm our employees with a new skill set, bring our technical and non-technical teams closer together, and provide the entire company with a deeper understanding and appreciation of what we do.

To accomplish this, we set an ambitious goal of having all of our employees learn how to write code in 2012.

Three months ago, we announced to our 60-person company that each employee was going to learn how to code in 2012. We named the initiative the “Codinization Project”. After the initial moments of surprise in the room faded, I explained to our employees the reasons why we were undertaking this initiative.

As leading technology companies have shown time and time again, being smarter than the competition and building superior technology is the only way a company can succeed over the long term. We felt that this Codinization Project was the challenging yet necessary step we needed to build a deeper understanding across the company of the intricacies of our technology platforms and products. If we could equip our employees with a solid foundation of knowing why our products do what they do, the more intelligent they would become in every element of our business, from product planning to client communications, implementations, and customer support.

We were also inspired by witnessing firsthand an example of similar dedication. Rakuten, our Japanese parent company, has been tremendously successful in pursuing its “Englishnization Initiative” in which Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten founder and CEO, is having the entire 12,000-person workforce learn English.

Rakuten’s dedication and their success with this initiative showed our team that with the right training and effort, we too could push ourselves to new heights that before had seemed impossible.

Last, we were confident that the project would encourage additional communication and collaboration between our technical and non-technical departments. Our engineers would serve as mentors, giving lessons, providing training and tutoring, and answering programming questions.

With the plan and motivations laid out for the company, we began our Codinization Project.

Knowing we could not embark on a project of this scale and complexity alone, we researched available programming training resources. After careful consideration we chose to partner with the web programming tutorial company Codecademy. The Codecademy training courses are free, formatted in a user-friendly approach, and offer custom creation tools which enable our engineers to develop specific coursework relevant to our products.

In the end, it made the choice for which training resource to choose a no-brainer. I called Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims and explained what we were trying to accomplish. He was instantly intrigued by our commitment and enthusiasm. We were the first company he was aware of that was having its entire workforce learn how to code. Zach graciously agreed to come to our Boston headquarters to help officially launch this project to all of our employees, including walking through a tutorial in the Codecademy platform.

Shortly after our official rollout to the company, our chief technology officer reviewed the programming lessons provided by Codecademy and established a project schedule which takes our employees through the JavaScript language. We made sure that the training was spread out enough (just four or five hours of coursework each month) so as in not to become a burden on our employees’ already busy schedules.

To promote collaboration, we also grouped our employees into teams of four or five, with an engineer serving as mentor for each group. This ensures that no employee feels alone while working their way through the project. Employees have colleagues they can go to with questions as well as a mentor who helps provide the additional assistance and training they may need. For our engineers, it provided them with an opportunity to share their knowledge and experience, teaching their colleagues.

To keep things fun, we’ve also hosted several “coding lunches” where the entire company spends an hour or so working in their groups completing the assigned coursework for that week. The employees enjoy the break, and it provides an opportunity to work through the lessons together, having their questions answered and being able to learn from each other.

We are also in the midst of rolling out additional monthly training sessions facilitated by our engineering team for any employee who wishes to receive more training on the subject matter being covered that month.

While we’re only three months into the Codinization Project, I am already noticing the impact the project is making. The dialogue and questions I am hearing from both the “learning” and “mentoring” sides has been inspiring to me. Technical and non-technical employees are enjoying working together to help raise the company’s collective product knowledge and understanding.

It’s also brought together teams that otherwise might not have had the opportunity work together. The Codecademy platform has met our initiative’s needs, providing non-technical employees with engaging, appropriate training lessons to introduce them to the JavaScript language.

I have faith in our team that we will succeed, and I am excited to watch our progression through our Codinization Project. With that in mind, I better go… I’m late completing my Codecademy homework.

Michael Jaconi is CEO of FreeCause, a loyalty and rewards platform for brands and consumers. He also serves as an executive officer at Rakuten, FreeCause’s parent company and one of the world’s largest Internet service companies in the world. While Jaconi possesses an extensive background in business, politics, and media, the Codinization Project represents his first foray into computer programming.

]]>1Why one company is making all its employees learn how to codeLearn HTML and CSS free online with Codecademyhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/04/02/codecademy-html-css/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/02/codecademy-html-css/#commentsMon, 02 Apr 2012 18:19:48 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=411233Codecademy, the hit website for teaching yourself how to code, just opened up new courses for HTML and CSS. If you want to learn HTML, you can start with the Codecademy HTML 101 courses right now. The site is interactive and will prompt you through guided coding lessons, and it’s all completely free of charge. […]
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Codecademy, the hit website for teaching yourself how to code, just opened up new courses for HTML and CSS.

If you want to learn HTML, you can start with the Codecademy HTML 101 courses right now. The site is interactive and will prompt you through guided coding lessons, and it’s all completely free of charge.

These are the first courses the site has offered in a language outside of JavaScript, and the founders are excited about the floodgates they’ve opened.

“I think, as you’ve seen, we’ve dealt with large groups before,” Zach Sims, one of the young founders of this Y Combinator startup, wrote to VentureBeat in an email this morning. “We’ve already served more than a million users Codecademy courses.”

Sims also notes that Code Year, the company’s project to get people coding in 2012, has nearly half a million weekly participants, as well.

Sims and his colleagues hope that the new courses teaching a simpler set of technologies will make the site and the lessons even easier for younger learners to get their heads around. “Codecademy (and programming!) should be for anyone and everyone, he said. “HTML is often easier to understand as it’s more visual.”

The courses were user-generated through the site’s Creators feature, which lets vetted professionals craft lessons on the Codecademy instruction platform. The HTML 101 course was created by Andy Abi Haydar.

“We’re used in all different types of classrooms,” Sims continued. “We’ve had emails from teachers at universities, middle schools, and high schools. We hope HTML and CSS are an awesome complement to the courses that they’re already using.”

Codecademy launched last August in that summer’s Y Combinator class. Quickly drawing a fair amount of attention from the developer community, the team was able to raise a $2.5 million funding round from the early-stage investor community.

]]>0Learn HTML and CSS free online with CodecademyWant to teach someone to code? Codecademy’s got an app for thathttp://venturebeat.com/2012/01/30/teach-development-courses-on-codecademy/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/30/teach-development-courses-on-codecademy/#commentsTue, 31 Jan 2012 00:01:24 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=383886Codecademy, the white-hot startup that teaches even total novices how to code, has launched a new tool: Creators lets anyone create a course on Codecademy and teach technology to over a million budding developers. “We’re going from being a content company (creating courses) to becoming a platform for others to create courses,” said Codecademy co-founder […]
]]>Codecademy, the white-hot startup that teaches even total novices how to code, has launched a new tool: Creators lets anyone create a course on Codecademy and teach technology to over a million budding developers.

“We’re going from being a content company (creating courses) to becoming a platform for others to create courses,” said Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims in an email to VentureBeat.

“This is probably the biggest announcement we’ve made yet.”

Codecademy started out offering just JavaScript tutorials. The Creators user-generated courses will also include courses in Ruby and Python. Course creators will also be able to use the Creators site as a reputation-building tool, and Codecademy will screen course creators’ credentials to keep the riffraff out.

Also new Monday, Sims said, is a redesign for the startup’s site, including a new code editor that “really enhances the learning experience [and] shows line-by-line debugging.” The site now also features challenges, part of what Sims called the site’s “new educational philosophy.”

The startup is trying to bring a new focus to web development with its Code Year project, a New Year’s resolution-themed initiative to get more people to learn how to code in 2012.

]]>0Want to teach someone to code? Codecademy’s got an app for thatHow to build your startup without learning codehttp://venturebeat.com/2012/01/30/how-to-build-your-startup-without-learning-code/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/30/how-to-build-your-startup-without-learning-code/#commentsMon, 30 Jan 2012 19:23:13 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=383729GUEST: If you can’t code but aspire to start a Web business, odds are you feel just like the ostrich. Ostriches can’t fly, and to add insult to injury, they’re one of the largest bird species out there. They have to hobble around looking for something to do while their avian counterparts swoop into the air […]
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If you can’t code but aspire to start a Web business, odds are you feel just like the ostrich. Ostriches can’t fly, and to add insult to injury, they’re one of the largest bird species out there. They have to hobble around looking for something to do while their avian counterparts swoop into the air in boundless directions.

Despite spending years in school and hours at the workplace, without knowing how to code you can’t create your vision. You’re left with two options: learn to code (Codeacademy is worthy investment of your time if you can fit it in), or find a programmer (an undertaking that warrants its own article). Given the frustrations, many would-be entrepreneurs give up on their vision without giving it a real chance. That’s a pity, and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Here are some tips and tool-recommendations to help you build a Web business without learning how to code.

Simulate your vision with visual tools

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As an entrepreneur, your goal is to assemble the necessary resources to create your idea. Finding the required talent and money means selling your vision. The first knee-jerk reaction is to write a business plan. Although useful, a business plan is not the best communication tool. It can be jargony, dense, overly-complicated, and simply put, it doesn’t showcase your idea. (If you write anything, go for a 2-3 page executive summary.)

Instead, I recommend building a website mockup. Show each page’s function and simulate how they behave by linking them to one another. Powerpoint is a great tool for this since you can link buttons to each slide easily. I recommend investing in a mockup tool (my personal favorite is Balsamiq), which is very user-friendly given its drag-drop functions. If done properly, your mockups can have the look and feel of a real website. Now friends, investors, or potential co-founders can see your vision instead of reading a long, dry document. If you want to take this to the next step, make a video by “screen recording” your mockup (I use Snapz Pro) and adding some narrative and music using a basic movie editing software like iMovie.

Create a prototype using widget-based website creators

Prototyping is all about validating individual portions of your concept. Use widget-based website creators to quickly and easily put together a prototype.Weebly, Wix, and WordPress (just to name a few examples) can be very powerful when mixed with a little creativity.

Letting potential users interact with something will give you valuable data, which you can easily capture using data analytics. My favorite is Google Analytics because it’s free and easy to implement (it just got a great upgrade too). If you can’t capture particular data, use surveys (Qualtrics is a fantastic tool which lets you capture 250 surveys for free) to engage users.

How do you get testers? Put the page up on your Facebook wall, send e-mail blasts, or offer a raffle or a perk (for example, first to get access to your site once it’s built). Having data in your pocket will both educate you and provide compelling information when you’re trying to recruit others or raise funds.

Brand your vision

We live in a world where the smallest startup can look and feel like one of the biggest companies out there. Make sure you snag a good domain name and create an attractive logo. You can inexpensively outsource design jobs to sites like 99designs or Crowdspring.

Once you have some visuals and an identity, cover your bases: Create a landing page for your site (LaunchRock is a good tool for that), set up a Facebook page (claim your facebook.com/yourbrand), and start developing an audience through Twitter. Family and friends will want to support you, and potential clients will be interested in learning about your company. Having an online presence gives you a stage where others can share in your journey. You’ll have a community of eager users ready to support you faster than you think.

Enjoy your launchpad and raise money

Your company is now live. You’ve established a presence and have powerful tools to sell your vision. If you want to hire talent, you now have somewhere to point applicants. If you need support, you can show family and friends a preview of what you want to build. If you want to raise money, you can go on Kickstarter or AngelList with a bit more credibility (and hopefully a mockup video in hand).

Tony Navarro (@hoostony) is founder and CEO of Streamcal.com, a venture that redefines the way schedules and calendars are published, shared and consumed across the web. He has an MBA from Wharton and an MPA from Harvard, and currently lives in Boston with his wife. He is also a member of The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs.

]]>0How to build your startup without learning codeSet hidden traps for cyber criminals with Mykonos Softwarehttp://venturebeat.com/2012/01/23/mykonos-software-funding/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/23/mykonos-software-funding/#commentsTue, 24 Jan 2012 00:54:47 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=381079Mykonos Software sets “tar traps” to catch of cyber criminals trying to hack your Web app. The company announced a $4 million first round of funding today. “After 20 years of leading technology companies that sell to large enterprises, I believe that Mykonos’ ability to use deception in cyber security could forever change the economics […]
]]>Mykonos Software sets “tar traps” to catch of cyber criminals trying to hack your Web app. The company announced a $4 million first round of funding today.

“After 20 years of leading technology companies that sell to large enterprises, I believe that Mykonos’ ability to use deception in cyber security could forever change the economics of hacking,” said investor Jeff Clarke, who serves on the board of Red Hat, in a statement.

The company’s technology, called Web Intrusion Prevention Systems, is designed to add elements to your Web application’s code that have nothing to do with the web app itself. These include different forms or server files that act as a part of the code that a hacker must work around, but in reality are just a tip-off that an attack is in progress. Having the altered code stand, not as a piece of the web app, but as a decoy is what Mykonos considers a fail-safe for fake positives.

Mykonos’ investors include founder and chairman of Paychex Tom Golisano, who led the round, founder of Ironport Scott Banister, Clover Capital founder Mike Jones, and Jeff Clarke. The company plans to use the funding to build out its engineering team and security assets, along with more sales and marketing pushes.

David Koretz founded the company in 2009, which is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif.

]]>0Set hidden traps for cyber criminals with Mykonos SoftwareResolution: Learn to code in 2012. Here’s how you can starthttp://venturebeat.com/2012/01/02/codecademy-code-year/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/02/codecademy-code-year/#commentsMon, 02 Jan 2012 23:23:45 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=371581If you, like many wanna-be nerds, made a new year’s resolution to learn to code (or code better, or learn a new language) in 2012, Codecademy has a lovely new resource for you. And it’s totally free, too. Codecademy is a startlingly easy-to-use code-teaching website that debuted last year at Y Combinator’s Demo Days. It’s […]
]]>If you, like many wanna-be nerds, made a new year’s resolution to learn to code (or code better, or learn a new language) in 2012, Codecademy has a lovely new resource for you. And it’s totally free, too.

Codecademy is a startlingly easy-to-use code-teaching website that debuted last year at Y Combinator’s Demo Days. It’s easy enough for a complete beginner to use; just type code snippets as directed in the interactive console.

Now, the young hackers in the Codecademy have launched Code Year. Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims writes to VentureBeat that the new site is “the beginning of an initiative… to get more people to learn to code in 2012.”

Through Code Year, Codecademy will be sending out new courses each week. The courses will be simple and interactive, just like Codecademy’s main offering on its website. Budding developers who sign up for the courses will be able to track their progress.

As of this writing, more than 55,000 people have signed up for the challenge. Sims says that at one point during the day, around 100 people per minute were signing up.

Codecademy is joined by partners such as Y Combinator, TechStars, HackNY and Girl Develop IT in this project.

“We’re working with a bunch of other organizations to make sure 2012 is the year that programming begins to enter the mainstream consciousness,” says Sims.

Codecademy raised its first round of funding late in 2011. The $2.5 million chunk of change came from Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech, Thrive Capital, SV Angel and individual investors such as Dave Morin and Naval Ravikant.

The company launched in August. At that time, Sims told VentureBeat, “While the entrepreneurial community has exploded within the past year or two, there’s a constant shortage of developers and a tremendous number of businesspeople trying to learn to code … Programming literacy is going to be an incredibly important skill in the next few years, and we hope we can bring that to new groups of people.”

Codecademy lessons currently include instruction in JavaScript and jQuery.

]]>0Resolution: Learn to code in 2012. Here’s how you can startTwitter releases code for TextSecure to the open-source communityhttp://venturebeat.com/2011/12/20/twitter-releases-code-for-textsecure-to-the-open-source-community/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/20/twitter-releases-code-for-textsecure-to-the-open-source-community/#commentsTue, 20 Dec 2011 23:02:51 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=367963Android text-message-encrypting application TextSecure is now open-source, thanks to Twitter. On Tuesday, Twitter announced on its developer’s blog that it would be releasing the code from newly acquired Whisper Systems, starting with TextSecure. In November, Twitter acquired Android-security startup Whisper Systems and added its co-founders, Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson, to the Twitter team. With […]
]]>Android text-message-encrypting application TextSecure is now open-source, thanks to Twitter. On Tuesday, Twitter announced on its developer’s blog that it would be releasing the code from newly acquired Whisper Systems, starting with TextSecure.

In November, Twitter acquired Android-security startup Whisper Systems and added its co-founders, Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson, to the Twitter team. With the acquisition, Twitter also gained the code for Whisper System’s products including TextSecure, WhisperCore, WhisperMonitor and Flashback, all applications that are meant to make Android more secure.

Twitter plans to open up all of the code over the next few months, once it confirms that the code meets legal requirements and is viable for the open source community.

The code for TextSecure is available now on Github for anyone to use as they like. Twitter said in its blog post that it hopes people will find the code useful and build upon it. Whisper Systems’ other applications will likely be made open-source in the coming months.

]]>0Twitter releases code for TextSecure to the open-source communityTwitter unveils Bootstrap, a toolkit for lightning-fast web app deploymenthttp://venturebeat.com/2011/08/19/twitter-bootstrap/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/19/twitter-bootstrap/#commentsSat, 20 Aug 2011 03:33:30 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=322469Today, Twitter gave developers a set of tools for getting web apps built and shipped as rapidly and cleanly as possible. Called Bootstrap, the toolkit is a library of relatively simple but elegant HTML and CSS conventions for building web apps. In many ways, it’s similar to the CSS framework Blueprint. Bootstrap doesn’t run on […]
]]>Today, Twitter gave developers a set of tools for getting web apps built and shipped as rapidly and cleanly as possible.

Called Bootstrap, the toolkit is a library of relatively simple but elegant HTML and CSS conventions for building web apps. In many ways, it’s similar to the CSS framework Blueprint.

Bootstrap doesn’t run on Twitter’s platform; the company just fostered its development and is now releasing it into the world.

As Twitter designer Mark Otto wrote on the Twitter developer blog, Bootstrap “uses some of the latest browser techniques to provide you with stylish typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and everything else you need in a super tiny (only 6k with gzip) resource.”

Bootstrap will likely be a particular boon to the not-so-design-focused developer/entrepreneur who simply needs to get a great app live on the web in a short period of time.

The Twitter team says Bootstrap should be easy for any web designer or developer to implement, and once it’s compiled, Bootstrap contains CSS and CSS alone.

The toolkit is supposed to be great for cross-browser compatibility for modern web browsers — a constant concern for latter-day web designers and developers. Although Bootstrap doesn’t currently support IE 7 and 8, the team is working to correct that right now.

Bootstrap is built with Less CSS, a CSS pre-processor that extends the language with dynamic behaviors and runs on both the client side in modern browsers (read: nothing less older than IE 6) and on the server side with Node.js.

Otto notes that Bootstrap was originally an internal tool developed during Twitter’s first Hackweek. Now, Bootstrap is used across the board for all Twitter’s internal apps, of which there are many.

“With the help and feedback of many engineers, Bootstrap has grown significantly to encompass not only basic styles but more elegant and durable front-end design patterns,” wrote Otto. “This release represents our first public 1.0 release and the open sourcing of many months of hard work.”

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